Saturday, March 22, 2025

Dinosaur Trail

The Dinosaur Trail runs from the equestrian camp across the creek from our camp and out westward then around eventually coming back towards our camp.  There are very ancient fossilized tracks in mud turned to rock.  Details in the photos.  

the trail goes through acres of Prickly Pear cactus.  We stopped to talk to some kids playing in the wash, they stopped playing to meet Skye.  Yeah, she has that affect on people, even kids.  One of them told us that trail just has cactus as far as the eye can see.  He’s pretty much right.  And everything is flat, so you can see quite a ways.
We got to the spot on the map that indicated dinosaur tracks, but could not find any.  Nothing looked right.  Carlene walked a circle around the asterisk, nothing.  With the tracking feature turned on you can literally walk a circle around a feature on the electronic map.  Tech can be hilarious at times!  A bit later we came to a dry creek that was worn down to the very flat base rock.  I thought that would be a.good place for fossil tracks.  But it wasn’t marked by any signs.  We saw a picnic table to have lunch and discovered that the sign was up there.  See photo.  Back down to the creek bed and found them.  We had seen them but they were not as obvious tracks as we thought they might be.
Off again, completed the circle trail.  Skye was getting pretty warm.  She kept stopping at the shady places.  She had plenty of water, just getting warm.  It was 80+, so she was right.Now, much later, it is very dark here.  Being such a warm day I’m still outdoors in shorts & T-shirt and quite comfortable.  Star gazing is great, very dark sky area.  With Jupiter and Mars prominent Sirius makes a near perfect equilateral triangle with them.
Hard to believe it is almost 9.  Nearly time to give Skye her last walk of the night.

Heading to Elgin, TX tomorrow.  One night HH.  That’s just east of Austin.

The equestrian camp, several horse trailers but we didn’t see any horses.




These are Horse-Bike-Hike trails, so they have water for the horses

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The photo made a rather poor transfer, so, it says these are Permion Period tracks, 300 million years old.  Although the maps call them dinosaur tracks they were made 90 million years before the dinosaurs appeared!













For the moment there isn’t anything happening between here and Florida




1 comment:

  1. Pretty neat! That's some pretty old tracks there. Hard to imagine people and especially kids being attracted to Skye!

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